The Roles and Responsibilities of Web Governance

Do all employees in your organization know what their role is, and what is expected of them? Do employees know who to ask questions outside their own work area? Do you know what every employee in your web team does?

We’ve previously posted a short guide to mapping your current web governance. As mentioned in that blog post, web governance is all about having structures for decisions and responsibilities in place, which ensure that all work done on the organization's website is aligned with business goals.

One of the corner stones of good web governance is that everybody involved in the company website is aware of their role. This is true no matter if you are a web developer spending all your time working on the website or if you are an editor spending just one hour a week on updating content within your work area.

Web governance roles

When you work with roles in terms of the website, you'll have to make sure that all aspects of the website are thought through. Web governance is not only governing day to day decisions, such as who will write the next blog post or do we need more RAM in our web servers. Your web governance should also cover who decides how web content is organized, which criteria need to be met before you'll have to get a new website, and who is responsible for following up on web strategic goals.

The roles that are on an organization’s web team depends on the size of the organization and the people in the team, but some typical roles include:

Website owner

Project manager

Web editor

Web developer

Server administrator

Information architect

Analytics specialist

Usability specialist

Depending on your organization you can have a lot more roles, but you can also have colleagues who have more than one of these roles. It is a good idea to map all the roles of your organization and put a name on them so that each person is aware of their role.

Web governance responsibilities

Uncovering and assigning all the web related roles for the organization is only one small step on the way. To make sure that each person is aware of their responsibilities and what is expected of them, it is important that the responsibilities of the role in relation with individual web tasks are clearly defined.

One way to do this is to use a responsibility-assignment-matrix (RACI), where each role is assigned one of the following four responsibility types for each task.

Responsible - The persons who do the actual work on the task. Often this will be web editors, web developers or the like.

Accountable - The one person who is held accountable for the timely completion of the task. This will often be the person delegating the task to the Responsible. Typically this is a team leader or project manager.

Consulted - Those who are asked for advice or opinions. Typically information architects or experts in a two way communication.

Informed - Those who are informed or kept up-to-date on progress. For example, team members not involved in the task or from related teams.

By filling out such a matrix with all web related tasks you can make sure that all team members are aware of their responsibilities and that web activities are kept on track.

When all members of a web team are aware of their roles and responsibilities, the team will function better and make fewer errors.